This course will trace the evolution of poetic discourse in France, focusing on four periods: Renaissance love lyric, the Romantic poetics of hyperbole, Symbolist poetics (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme) and twentieth-century innovations (Apollinaire, Valery, Breton, Eluard, Ponge, Michaux). The intertexual relationship of poetry to painting and music will help situate our reading within a broad cultural context. Students will present several reports and write brief essays in French on the poems studied.